The Challenge CurriculumLearning Outcomes

General Education Student Learning Outcomes

In addition to the area-specific Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) below, every General Education course must also address each of the following four SLOs:

1. Students will be able to analyze enduring and contemporary questions or challenges from multiple disciplines, using qualitative and quantitative methods;
2. Students will be able to use ethical, religious, or philosophical frameworks to evaluate their own and others’ responses to enduring and contemporary challenges
3. Students will be able to examine issues of cultural difference both locally and globally;
4. Students will be able to communicate effectively in written, spoken, and creative expression with a variety of audiences.

Arts

Overview
Arts courses promote an understanding of the interaction among the arts, culture, society, artist and audience; provide opportunity for students to engage in, and develop an understanding of, the creative process; and help students develop analytical, interpretive, or evaluative skills appropriate to the study, performance, and/or creation of at least one of the visual and performing arts.

Outcomes
Arts students will:
1. Analyze enduring and contemporary questions or challenges through the lens of the arts.
2. Create, perform, and communicate about the arts to an audience through written, spoken, and/or embodied creative expression.

Challenge Seminars

Overview
Challenge Seminar courses involve students in exploring a particular challenge or a pressing ethical question; devote significant time to working together to propose solutions to a problem or create something with a public audience in mind; and provide students with opportunities to reflect on how the college’s mission and their education as a whole has influenced their personal values, plans for life after college, and the role they see for themselves in the world.

Outcomes
Challenge Seminar students will:
1. Collaboratively analyze and respond to a significant enduring question or contemporary challenge, incorporating perspectives from multiple disciplines.
2. Draw on ethical, religious, or philosophical frameworks to evaluate their own and others’ responses to this challenge.
3. Examine how issues of cultural difference, both globally and locally, intersect with this challenge.
4. Seek out, critique, and adapt others’ ideas as they negotiate responses to specific challenges.
5. Reflect on how the college’s mission and their education as a whole has influenced their personal values, plans for life after college, and the role they see for themselves in the world.

First-Term Seminar Program (FTS)

Overview
FTS courses provide students the opportunity to develop critical thinking, writing, and thinking skills. FTS introduces students campus resources and to the process of academic planning, encouraging students to advocate for themselves as independent learners

Outcomes
FTS students will:
1. Articulate their values, communicate them to others, and reflect on how values shape decisions in an ethically complex world.
2. Evaluate arguments and their underlying assumptions from multiple perspectives.
3. Consider purpose, audience, and context when writing and speaking. 
4. Make and support claims when writing and speaking.
5. Demonstrate familiarity with the College curriculum and campus resources related to advising.

Global Affairs and Cultures

Overview
Global Affairs and Cultures courses focus on topics of global reach, past and/or contemporary; place the topic(s) in a global context and in relation to human populations; and include primary and secondary sources from the cultures included in the course.

Outcomes
Global Affairs and Cultures students will:
1. Demonstrate knowledge of and a critical perspective on one or more topics of global reach, past or contemporary. 
2. Demonstrate an understanding of the topic of the course in relation to human populations in their social, economic, cultural, political, or ecological environments.
3. Identify and explain multiple, culturally situated perspectives on the topic being studied. 

Non-English Languages and Cultures

Overview
Non-English Languages and Cultures courses provide ample and constant opportunities for students to practice the non-English target language; meet proficiency benchmarks in reading, listening, speaking and writing skills set by the department or program offering the target language; integrate study of the target language with the study of relevant cultures; and highlight ways in which cultural values and worldviews are articulated through the target language.

Outcomes
Non-English Languages and Cultures students will:
1. Increase their non-English language proficiency in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, and writing, as appropriate to the target language, in order to develop effective communication skills across languages and cultures.
2. Students will acquire knowledge and appreciation of products, practices, and perspectives of cultures related to the target language to develop the intercultural skills needed to ethically engage the world in its diversity.
3. Students will place their own cultural values in dialogue with the values of cultures related to the target language to better understand connections and divergences among global cultures.

U.S. Identities and Difference

Overview
U.S. Identities and Difference courses explore the ways that race and/or ethnicity have shaped U.S. identities and impacted policies, institutions, or communities within particular contexts; examine the intersectionality between race and/or ethnicity and at least one other category of identity in order to highlight the structures of power in which they operate; and use a majority of course content on singular or multiple non-majority racial and/or ethnic groups or guiding frameworks grounded in theories of race and ethnicity.

Outcomes
U.S. Identities and Difference students will:
1. Analyze the experiences of one or more non-majority ethnic or racial groups in the U.S. and their relevant histories, policies, and/or political struggles. 
2. Investigate injustices around identity construction in the United States at the personal and institutional levels. 
3. Analyze the vital connections among identity, privilege, and power. 
4. Reflect on their own identities within structures of power as they reflect on ways to foster a more just, equal, and inclusive society.

Human Behavior and Social Institutions

Overview
Human Behavior and Social Institutions courses introduce theories and principles that emerge from empirical research to explain human behavior and social institutions; introduce qualitative and quantitative methods of collecting, evaluating, and presenting information pertaining to human behavior and social institutions; address the context and stages of development for a particular social and behavioral science or interdisciplinary social scientific field of study; and address the social and ethical issues that arise in the study of human behavior and social institutions and practical and public efforts to change human behavior and social institutions.

Outcomes
Human Behavior and Social Institutions students will:
1. Identify and explain foundational theories and principles that have emerged from empirical research to explain human behavior and social institutions.
2. Demonstrate an understanding of how to use data to answer questions about behavior and social institutions.

Humanities

Overview
Humanities courses provide students with a framework for understanding and appreciating diverse modes of human experience and expression in their historical, intellectual, and/or cultural contexts; prepare students to critically analyze how humans construct meaning from human experience in particular historical, intellectual, and/or cultural contexts; provide students with models for investigating broader questions about the ways in which human beings construct meaning and values in human experience; and prepare students to undertake their own investigations into human thought, culture, and/or history.

Outcomes
Humanities students will:
1. Critically analyze a cultural product in its historical, intellectual, and/or cultural contexts.
2. Discuss the ways that humanities disciplines raise broader questions of meaning and values.

Natural Science

Overview
Natural Science courses include a laboratory component in which students have the opportunity to collect and analyze data, identify trends, answer questions, and/or draw conclusions; include opportunities for students to explore and practice communication of knowledge or work in the discipline to scientific and general audiences; are grounded in a discipline, field, or interdisciplinary area of science and address intersections of other ways of knowing outside of natural sciences; and include examples of historical, philosophical, or societal development of the discipline and the application of science to enduring and contemporary questions.

Outcomes
Natural Science students will:
1. Use the methods, concepts, language, and evidence they gather in at least one field of empirical science to answer a question about the natural world.
2. Formulate an argument or address a question about the natural world, supported with scientific evidence.

Quantitative Reasoning (QUANT)

Overview
QUANT courses engage students in practicing and refining their quantitative skills with feedback from the instructor; provide multiple opportunities to critique quantitative or logical assertions made in a variety of sources (e.g., existing logical or mathematical proofs, peer-reviewed academic literature, assertions made in public media) using mathematical, logical, statistical, and/or algorithmic reasoning; practice executing and using mathematical, logical, statistical, and/or algorithmic analysis to make decisions and/or solve problems, including thorough examination of assumptions, data quality, and methodology; and practice articulating the substance and meaning of a critical mathematical, logical, statistical, and/or algorithmic analysis of a complex problem, including assumptions, methods, limitations, broader impacts, and conclusions, with a specific audience. When relevant, students are encouraged to consider ethical/societal implications and historical context.

Outcomes
QUANT students will:
1. Critique quantitative or logical assertions using mathematical, logical, statistical, and/or algorithmic reasoning. 
2. Use mathematical, logical, statistical, and/or algorithmic analysis to make decisions and/or solve problems, including thorough examination of assumptions and utilization of proper methods.
3. Articulate the substance and meaning of a critical mathematical, logical, statistical, and/or algorithmic analysis of a complex problem, including assumptions, methods, limitations, broader impacts, and conclusions.

Theological Studies

Overview
Theological Studies courses substantively engage Christianity (usually at least half the course); develop religious literacy and an understanding of religious diversity by comparing the beliefs, texts, or practices of at least two religious traditions and/or exploring the relationship between at least two religious traditions; encourage students to understand religious traditions, beliefs, texts, and practices as appropriate objects of academic study by critically analyzing and evaluating religious and ethical claims; and enable students to understand the culturally and historically embedded nature of religious beliefs, practices, texts, and traditions, specifically by addressing how they have affected or been affected by social and cultural contexts, historical or contemporary. 

Outcomes
Theological Studies students will: 
1. Explain how and why particular religious traditions and/or religious beliefs have affected or been affected by social and cultural contexts, historical or contemporary. 
2. Critically evaluate religious and ethical claims.

Wellbeing

Overview
Wellbeing courses introduce at least one dimension of wellbeing (Emotional, Relational, Physical, Financial, Intellectual, Environmental, Vocational, Career, Spiritual) and explore strategies for developing that dimension; offer opportunities for students to explore how one additional dimension of wellbeing might intersect with the target/ focus dimension; and require opportunities to apply knowledge of wellbeing to personal and/or professional development. 

Outcomes
Wellbeing students will: 
1. Identify strategies for developing at least one dimension of wellbeing. 
2. Analyze enduring and contemporary challenges that stem from at least one dimension of wellbeing.
3. Explore their individual wellbeing using a multidimensional perspective.

Writing in the First Year (WRIT)

Overview
WRIT courses provide frequent opportunities to write informally as a way to engage unfamiliar concepts, explore ideas, and practice techniques for communicating effectively; guide students through at least two formal argumentative writing assignments for specific audiences, using a process-based approach so that students will draft, revise, and edit their work with instructor and peer feedback; and invite students to reflect in writing on who they are and what they learn. 

Outcomes
WRIT students will: 
1. Consider purpose, audience, and context when writing; in other words, they will develop rhetorical competence. 
2. Make and support claims effectively in writing as they develop argumentative skills.

Writing and Information Literacy (WRITL)

Overview
WRITL courses provide opportunities for students to use informal writing to explore ideas and reflect on their learning frequently, using their own words to describe key concepts, respond to readings, record observations, or organize their understanding of material; provide some class time for students to investigate how writers use different forms of information (e.g., news reporting, opinion, satire, advertising, scholarly research, social media) as they make and support claims in multiple contexts; help students develop rhetorical flexibility by writing at least two forms of expression for different audiences; and require students to draft, revise and edit at least two short pieces of writing with peer and instructor feedback.

Outcomes
WRITL students will: 
1. Students distinguish and evaluate different forms of information and analyze the arguments that such information supports. 
2. Students use their own language to describe and analyze key concepts or course materials, and write to explore ideas, assimilate new knowledge, and reflect on the purpose of their learning. 
3. Students write arguments that make and support claims successfully for readers in multiple contexts. 
4. Students are able to draft, revise, and edit work with feedback from others.

Writing in the Disciplines (WRITD)

Overview
WRITD courses require students to find or generate at least some of the texts, data, artifacts, artworks, etc. that will be source material for their writing; teach students to evaluate and incorporate information or source material into a project, as appropriate to the discipline, and use that material to make and support claims; require students to draft, revise, and edit at least one major writing assignment or a series of shorter writing assignments with instructor and peer feedback; and provide some class time for students to discuss and practice stages of the writing process.

Outcomes
WRITD students will:
1. Demonstrate rhetorical competence by creating texts that meet the needs of specific purposes, audiences, and contexts, particularly those demanded by the discipline.
2. Critically evaluate information in order to write arguments that communicate effectively with specific audiences.
3. Draft, revise, and edit work with feedback from others. 
4. Write in ways that exemplify the structures, genres, and conventions of a discipline. 

Note: The provisions of the Gustavus academic bulletin are not an irrevocable contract between the student and the College. The College reserves the right to change any provision or requirement at any time during the student's term of residence.